Friends of Lorine Niedecker

Issue #31 Winter 2020

I was the solitary plover

a pencil

for a wing-bone

From the secret notes

I must tilt

upon the pressure

execute and adjust

In us sea-air rhythm

“We live by the urgent

wave of the verse”

Page 1

I was the solitary plover...

Landscapes By Diane Washa Exhibited

Artist Diane Washa attended the

first Lorine Niedecker Poetry Festival

in 2009. She made her way to Black-

hawk Island and began a plein air paint-

ing (painting outside) of Mud Lake

across from Lorine’s cabin. The place

captured her creative spirit and she has

been a Lorine Niedecker ambassador

ever since. The Friends of Lorine

Niedecker used one of her paintings for

our Festival image in 2015.

Washa is an award-winning painter

who takes inspiration from changing

landscapes. She creates paintings in an

intriguingly abstract style that is rich in

detail. She most often works en plein

air.

Washa came late to her now-

productive life as an artist. A business

executive by day, she got more serious

about her life-long passion for painting

in 2005. Several years later, Washa was

exhibiting in galleries and at art exhibi-

tions.

Her latest solo show, Of Water, Air

and Poetry: Perspectives en Plein Air

was at the Able Contemporary Gallery

in Stoughton, Wisconsin, a short dis-

tance down the road from Fort Atkin-

son. All thirty of her paintings inspired

titles from Lorine Niedecker’s poems.

Her paintings can be seen at

www.abelcontemporary.com/diane-

washa

Experimentation excites Washa's art.

Her continuing education in painting

includes working side-by-side with art-

ists doing nonrepresentational images in

oil. Her landscapes are magical.

Diane is considering a series of

paintings on Blackhawk Island in 2021.

Stay tuned.

Page 2

POETRY

Bittern

small, brown,

circum-

spect, hard

to place

its song

shy cough

subdued

renown

David Eberly

Orion

was once

called

Ou-rion

He went out

on a hunt

one day got

himself

up into star

light what

a ride

Steven Manuel

a pencil Snow’s Lessons

You teach us well

the thousand varieties

of gesture:

soundlessness,

as of leaf unfolding--

mindlessness,

that is, the white

subtraction

from what is--

childlike-ness,

that is,

helplessness

to beauty--

the rhythm that coheres

in randomness--

the necessary separateness

between flakes--

Oh, and order—

reparation for creativity’s

amplitude.

And of how mercy falls--

(By surprise).

Mary Lux

Page 3

Lake Itasca, Mississippi’s Source The loon alone,

at far end of lake,

drifts decoy-still,

center of a widening gyre

of quiet

like a smile.

The roseate half-shell

of evening sky

thins to oyster pearl.

We campers wait,

on our fallen log,

for the chalk-cheeked moon

to rise, a geisha,

and gaze at all the

restless rites

of settling down

going on around us

at the edge of sight.

A goldfinch penetrates

the hooded firs

and disappears.

The bittern’s last “soaked pump”

abruptly stops

in cattail reeds.

A goose’s bossy honk,

herds his family west;

drops into an island’s silhouette.

Green frog’s last leap,

a spring-loaded plop,

ejects him from the swampy sedge.

for a wing-bone

A water strider skates

beside our feet

on water’s silken sheet.

Whirligig beetle’s

battery-powered spin

winds ever slower.

The last bluebottle fly

lifts off a pickerel’s carcass,

replete.

Upshore, the great blue heron

coasts down this way

to stalk the shadows.

One by one

we, too, suspend

all motion, random talk.

As movement dies

around the sphere,

so rests thought.

Ringmaster loon,

now satisfied, sends up

his ice-age ululation

one last time--

then plunges into

night’s black depths

of deep subconscious,

along with us,

in his antipodal dive.

Mary Lux

Page 4

Purslane Wild weedy

little tongues

what wonder I keep

forgetting your name.

Wing All my life:

one morning

I get you

cabbage white

empty space

either side

of the page

passing through.

Cutting Remember where they cut you off.

remember which way is up.

Try to grow roots in a waterglass,

calligraphy searching for words.

Take in the broken angle,

and when they plant you out

and cover you up

don’t choke like a corpse, hold on.

From the secret notes

Forty-Watt Bulb (Thinking of Lorine) Another hundred-year rain this month,

such is exile. It came on suddenly,

the way the dead in my address book

came to outnumber the living.

Claudia, Edwin, Cid — who’s left ...

Then it stops for now: My basement’s flooded.

A forty-watt bulb

flickers overhead,

and I keep reading.

John Martone Lucia

Although I woke

at the usual time

the morning of Lucia Day

it was unusually dark

So dark, not a single streak

of light brushed the sky

So dark, not a pale wash

of pink tinted the horizon

For just a moment,

blackening fright arose

Maybe this day dawn

would not come

Elizabeth Harmatys Park

Page 5

The Pipestone Pipe/Let There Be Peace

Nancy Shea

In July 1968, Lorine and her husband Al visited

Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota. Photos

of the trip are found in the digital archive: Scrap-

book of Lorine Niedecker's on travels in 1967-68 to

Lake Superior, Michigan, Canada, North Dakota,

and Minnesota. An artifact from this trip is returned

to Wisconsin after 50 years abroad.

At Pipestone National Monument, Red Minne-

sota Catlinite is still quarried only by the hands of

authorized tribal members. The quarry is consid-

ered sacred and has been a place of peace. Archaeo-

logical evidence suggests that it has been mined for

over 3,000 years by various Plains Tribes. Pipe-

stone, traditionally used only for pipes, is mined

from between layers of a very hard stone called

Sioux Quartzite. The bowl of the pipe is carved

from pipestone (Catlinite), and the stem most often

made of either ash or sumac. The Pipestone Nation-

al Monument has a visitor center, including cultural

displays and an area where artisans sell their work.

Lorine made a purchase there. As she writes to Cid

Corman, "I never buy things on our trips but I

couldn’t resist two pipes…"

Lorine describes the two pipes and her trip to

Pipestone in a letter to Cid Corman dated August 1,

1968. She describes the pipes: "My long pipe is

called a ceremonial pipe and the shorter one the

kind smoked individually for no special reason."

She describes beading on buckskin strings tied

around the stem and her plan to add feathers, but

does not clarify which, or both, of the pipes has the

buckskin on the stem. Lorine writes, "but when

sometime I come upon the feathers of a dead male

mallard I’ll use those as the Indians did—they also

used feathers from red headed woodpeckers and

gold eagle." Lorine seems enamored with Pipestone

and her pipes. "The Indians believed the stone was

sacred, that the blood of their ancestors flowed or

I must tilt

froze in the stone." She describes displaying the

pipes in a wall mounting along with a scimitar, or

short sword, of Al’s, "to get some peace represented

along with the murderous thing."

One of these pipes, which she describes as the

shorter one, she gave to Stuart Montgomery in

October of 1968. Stuart Montgomery of London

was the founder of Fulcrum Press that published

Niedecker’s book, North Central in 1968 and My

Life by Water in 1970. He visited Niedecker at

Blackhawk Island when he was in the United States

on a reading tour. She describes the visit in a letter

to Cid Corman dated October 22, 1968, though no

mention is made of giving Stuart Montgomery the

pipe or how this transaction took place. Stuart

Montgomery was the holder of the short pipe until

he gave it to Jenny Penberthy in June of 2010.

Jenny Penberthy, a professor at Capilano Uni-

versity in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada,

has focused her research on Lorine Niedecker and

has been the editor of several Niedecker books

including Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works. In

September 2018, Jenny Penberthy was in Wisconsin

doing research and a presentation at Beloit College.

She brought the "short pipe" back to Wisconsin and

gifted it to the Hoard Museum. The "short pipe" is

now held in the Lorine Niedecker collection. This

pipe, like Lorine’s poetry, has traveled the

"regions," and for 50 years has been in the care of

two individuals who played significant roles in

bringing her poetry to the world.

The large pipe is mentioned by Lorine in one of

her last letters to Louis Zukovsky dated November

9, 1970. She describes preparing for Cid Corman’s

visit that occurred November 15, 1970. Lorine

writes about Al building a bookcase that will hold a

ship model of the Cutty Sark, the scimitar, and the

"large Indian peace pipe." The whereabouts of the

"large pipe" is yet unknown but, as history does, it

will likely turn up.

Continued next page

“Short pipe” purchased by Lorine Niedecker at Pipestone National Monument now held at Hoard Museum, Fort Atkinson

Page 6

The Pipes are mentioned in letters published in:

Faranda, Lisa Pater. Between Y our House and

Mine: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid

Corman, 1960 to 1970, Duke University Press,

1986. (pg. 168)

Penberthy, Jenny. Niedecker and the Correspond-

ence with Zukofsky, 1931-1970, Cambridge

University Press, 1993. (pg. 361)

See also:

Penberthy, Jenny. Lorine Niedecker: Collected

Works, University of California Press, 2002.

Niedecker notes, photos and her drawing of a

ceremonial pipe at:

http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/

WI.FALightGreenScrap

http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/

WI.FAMinn

http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/

WI.FALakeSeries

Teaching Lorine Niedecker in a Massive

Open Online Context

Max McKenna

I first encountered the work of Lorine Niedecker

the way I suspect many people do—with the poem

"Poet’s Work." It was not part of any class assign-

ment; rather, it was printed on a notecard and

stashed among other scraps and pamphlets in a

room at the Kelly Writers House, an arts organiza-

tion on the campus of the University of Pennsylva-

nia, where I was a work-study student. The card had

been part of a program that the Writers House had

upon the pressure

hosted at some point, I’m not exactly sure what. To

this day, that’s still how I prefer to encounter

Lorine’s poems, out in the archival wild, although

that kind of happenstance has gotten harder and

harder to engineer.

I didn’t get the poem at the time. Back then, I

thought poems were something to be gotten. But it

stuck with me. It seemed to share in a terse sense of

humor I always loved, probably because I was never

much good at it.

Some years later, while working as an Adminis-

trative Assistant at the Writers House, I was tapped

by the organization’s director, Professor Al Filreis,

to serve as a teaching assistant for an online poetry

course he was designing for Coursera, an initiative

out of Stanford that was partnering with institutions

across the country to develop online versions of

their signature course offerings, everything from

STEM classes to lit classes. Al wanted to adapt his

brick-and-mortar class on modern American poetry,

known around campus as English 88, into a massive

open online course, or MOOC for short. Early on, it

was decided that the course should foster the same

intimate seminar environment, which was a

challenge, given that there stood to be tens of thou-

sands of enrollees in the MOOC (that first year, we

had more than thirty thousand people sign up).

Al’s MOOC was called Modern & Contempo-

rary American Poetry, lovingly abbreviated to Mod-

Po. Less than four months before going live, Al

convened his panel of teaching assistants, of which I

was one, for a marathon video shoot that resulted in

more than seventy hours of taped video discussions

of each of the poems on the course’s syllabus—this

formed the backbone of ModPo’s content. In order

to model an accessible and collaborative approach

to the material, the videos were shot with minimal

preparation and the participants had varying degrees

of familiarity with the texts (poetry was not my

Close up of Niedecker drawing of a ceremonial pipe from: Niedecker, Lorine / Lake Superior American Lake Series-Ft. Library.

http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WI.FALakeSeries

Page 7

main interest back then; I had concentrated in my

BA on European modernist fiction). This is still

how I prefer to discuss poetry, and it was during this

time that I had my second formal encounter with

Lorine Niedecker.

ModPo’s pedagogical gambit is to use the

figures of nineteenth century poets Walt Whitman

and Emily Dickinson to articulate two distinct poet-

ic trends that would emerge over the course of the

twentieth century: toward the maximal and toward

the minimal, although this is, of course, a delightful-

ly juicy oversimplification. Niedecker enters the

syllabus as a Dickinsonian, a writer who prizes

concision, the radical power of the imagination, and

poetry’s capacity to be a site for feminine agency,

especially in times and places that lack it. Like any

good syllabus—or at least any syllabus of good

material—the categories get hazy, and we could

easily dash them all with a simple example: how

can a poem like "Paean to Place" be anything but a

work of midcentury Whitmanianism?

In an early video, Professor Al asked his panel

of “students” to declare their preference for either

the Whitmanian or Dickinsonian mode. I took the

side of the Dickinsonians, in no small part because

we had just discussed Niedecker’s “[You are my

friend].” That poem’s ending flourish, “nothing in

it / but my hand,” wowed me with its masterful one-

two punch of melancholy and attitude, which I

usually associated with the best punk music. I’m not

sure what Lorine Niedecker would think of her

hands becoming fists in this gloss of mine, or

whether it’s juvenile to graft the punk aesthetic back

onto somebody who died before punk music even

existed (a classical music fan I know once flipped at

the characterization of Mozart as “a punk rocker of

his day”). But in any case, I was converted.

ModPo has been offered every fall since 2012,

in ten-week sessions that run from September to

about Thanksgiving. I’ve served as a teaching assis-

tant each year, helping to monitor and foster text-

based discussions in the course’s online forums.

These forums are what allow students to participate

and interact, and they operate a bit like social

media, with students making posts in response to

the video discussions, seizing on words, lines, and

concepts in each of the assigned poems—which

now number in the hundreds—and commenting on

each other’s interpretations. The result is an organic,

execute and adjust freewheeling intellectual conversation spanning

time zones, geographic distances, and intellectual

interests.

ModPo is a living project that expands with each

iteration. We regularly get thousands of partici-

pants, some of whom have returned from previous

sessions. There’s now a sizable ModPo community

made up of people from around the globe, discuss-

ing poets as varied as Allen Ginsberg, Susan Howe,

Bob Kaufman, and Charles Bernstein.

There is a palpable interest in Niedecker among

students new and old, and each year, as we come up

to the Niedecker unit in ModPo’s second week, I’m

reminded of the connective power of her work. Of

the three Niedecker poems included in our regular

syllabus, "Poet’s Work," "[You are my friend]," and

"Foreclosure," it’s "Poet’s Work that perhaps reso-

nates the most (there’s a reason why it’s a chestnut

in Lorine’s oeuvre). This is in no small part because

ModPo students tend to be non-traditional learners,

in the sense that they are often older than typical

undergraduate students and may have already led

entire careers in fields far removed from literature.

For many members of the ModPo community, poet-

ry is either a budding interest or a long-forgotten

passion, and a central aim of the course is to make

poetry a little less academic—that is, to make it

accessible and to demonstrate how easily and richly

in can fit into your everyday life. This is in many

ways the story of "Poet’s Work." The poem is a

rebuke to that figurative, advising "grandfather" we

all have in our lives, the one who tells us to get a

good job (i.e. to grow up from such frivolity as po-

etry). It’s an alternative vision of work as something

intensely personal and edifying, where you can nev-

er be laid off. And that vision has proved remarka-

bly unifying.

Maybe in spite of herself—or at least in spite of

the solitary life she led—Lorine has helped build

communities. "No layoff from this condensery" is

something of a rallying cry in ModPo, which is fun-

ny to say of a line from a poet whose thought other-

wise evades such easy summary (contemporary poet

Rae Armantrout is another example from the Mod-

Po syllabus of a poet who manages to write with

equal pith and utter mystery). It’s not only the pa-

thos and personality of Lorine’s work that makes it

so effective in a massive online format; it’s also its

form. Her haiku-like poems have the ability to

Page 8

circulate like memes. It wouldn’t be surprising to

come across "Poet’s Work" in some corner of the

internet and to be halted, even just for a moment, by

its humor and complexity, the way that I was that

day at my work-study job, rifling through that box

of scrap paper.

In early 2019, I was given the opportunity to

design my own "mini-course," a deep dive into one

poet’s work that uses the Coursera site and other

resources of ModPo and that is offered outside of

the regular ten-week session. Such mini-courses

have become a common feature of ModPo.

By then, I had been living some years in the

Midwest, and I wanted to work with a Midwestern

poet. Who better than Lorine Niedecker? I was

aware of Lorine’s cabin up in Fort Atkinson, Wis-

consin, although I had yet to make the drive from

Chicago. And I knew the general beats of her biog-

raphy, although I had never lingered over them. I

checked out some books from the public library and

began my education.

I discovered poems like "[My friend tree]" and

the poems for Paul Zukofsky. I learned of her life,

difficultly intertwined with both nature and the

caprices of unkind men. Out of my research came a

monthlong course, which ran in February of 2019,

centered on eight poems, culminating in a weeklong

online discussion of "Paean to Place." None of the

course’s several dozen participants (save a few; see

below) had been to the place Lorine describes, and

yet the idea of "place" that she articulates in that

poem needs no geographic referent. For some

students, that place reminded them of Florida; for

others, it was an emotional and psychic destination

that anybody might travel to. A placeless place we

might all meet in—is that not the utopian dream of

the internet?

The small community of our mini-course led me

to other communities near to home. Some of the

participants, I soon learned, were members of the

Friends of Lorine Niedecker. And so that Septem-

ber, I travelled to Fort Atkinson, where I put faces

to names of people I had so far known only in

cyberspace; where I saw the town that enters how-

ever obliquely into so much of Lorine’s work (you

can’t realize this until you’ve been there); and

where I saw the cabin where Lorine once lived.

Like that, an abstract world of words and ideas

became material. Part of me felt like I had done it

all backwards. But it was perfect nonetheless.

In us sea-air rhythm Lorine Niedecker: Beautiful Pieces, Well

-placed Fragments

Tom Montag

Editor’s Note: this is the text of a presentation that

was given at the 2012 Lorine Niedecker WI Poetry

Festival

I want to look at four of my favorite Lorine Nie-

decker poems, to examine what I call "well-placed

fragments" in her work. The poems are:

"Depression Years" (Collected Works, p. 165),

"[My friend tree]" (p. 186), "Hospital Kitchen" (p.

205), and "Lake Superior" (p. 232).

What do I mean by "well-placed fragment?" On

the one hand, I am the kind of poet who believes

that any individual poem is a fragment of a greater

work, a greater poem, which is the poet's life work -

all one poem. Each poem is a "fragment" of the

poet's life-work. But this is not the kind of beautiful

fragment I want to talk about.

Instead, I want to look at the individual poem as

it is made from fragments or made into fragments,

which is the case in much of Lorine's work. We can

speak about Lorine's "fragments" in those two ways:

1. that she starts with a fragment to make into the

poem; and/or

2. that the finished poem itself exhibits fragment-

like qualities.

A fragment might properly be defined as: (1) "a

part detached from the whole;" or (2) "something

incomplete: an odd bit or piece." With Lorine's

poems, I'm using the word mostly in the first sense,

"a part detached from the whole," but there are also

times that we see "the odd bit or piece."

What kind of poet is Lorine? She is a lyric poet

who leaps. She is not a narrative poet who gives us

beginning, middle, and end, and all the necessary

parts between. She is not a philosophical poet who

leads us from argument to argument. She is not a

formalist who must fill out the line or the rhyme

(though her lines are often strictly measured).

Lorine is an objectivist, which is to say, she gaz-

es intently at the object and wants us to see it as it

is. She doesn't want to mediate between us and the

object, except that we see the world that she sees.

She doesn't tell us how she feels. She doesn't tell

Page 9

us what to feel.

In a sense, she is something of an imagist poet,

presenting images, leaping from image to image. In

a sense, she is a haiku poet, and -- as with Basho --

in her poems the frog must jump. That is to say, the

particulars of the poem must leap to greater mean-

ing. In a sense, she is a mosaic artist, someone who

puts together a shard of this, a shard of that, a shard

of something else, to make the poem something

greater than the sum of its parts. This is especially

the case in her longer poems, especially "Lake

Superior."

I know there are a lot of people who will argue

with what I say about Lorine's poetry, and that's

okay; in fact, that's good. Every set of eyes should

see Lorine's poems differently, just as Lorine saw

the world differently than the rest of us.

"Depression Years"

Early on, Lorine held radical political views,

explored automatic writing as a way into deeper

meaning, and appreciated the "folk" materials at

hand around her. Her poem "Depression Years"

makes use of some of those materials. Lorine

assumes a "mask" here, speaks in a voice not her

own, one which belongs to a Depression-era wom-

an. In these lines, Lorine becomes someone else,

and speaks as that woman would speak. Note, first,

that this is not the whole story, but only a portion of

it, meant to represent the whole.

Lorine uses the material in Lorine-like ways: it

is pithy; it is a cutting observation about society; it

exhibits her customary sense of humor, even in the

face of the seriousness. (What humor, you ask. She

rhymes "New MADrid" with "they did.") The poem

seems whole and complete in her handling of it, yet

doesn't it sound like a fragment of conversation?

"[My Friend Tree]"

Isn't "[My friend tree]" the quintessential

Niedecker short poem? It presents personal material

without becoming sentimental. Lorine would never

be sentimental. This one instant in her life, this one

fragment, reveals everything about her life, doesn't

it? If you know this poem, you know Lorine. What

are the three important elements in the poem? First,

(My friend) tree; second, I - Lorine (who sawed you

down); and, third, the sun. A beautiful fragment: the

tree, Lorine, the sun.

“We live by the urgent wave And listen to it: friend, attend, friend, down, sun.

The only ee sound in the poem is tree. The weight

of the sounds here falls, fittingly, on end - "friend,"

"attend," "friend." "Down" and "sun" both drop

down. Would we quibble with "sawed" instead of

"chopped" or "cut?" You chop or cut a tree down,

you saw it into logs, or boards. But neither "chop"

nor "cut" resonates with "see," which is the point of

the poem - she wanted to see the sun, so she sawed

the tree down - using a saw to see.

There is an oriental clarity in this poem, typical

of Objectivist poetry. Lorine doesn't speak of her

feelings, but lets the things of the poem speak for

themselves. She doesn't tell us what to think or feel.

She doesn't tell us what she thinks or feels; yet this

is a very personal poem, and one full of feeling.

Again, as with "Depression Years," she doesn't have

to give us the whole beginning, middle, and end of

the story, but only the right pieces, the fragments

which make a greater whole.

"Hospital Kitchen"

"Hospital Kitchen" is another very oriental

poem, very cool, clear, and crisp; yet again it's made

of very personal materials. We assume it was

written of a single small instant of experience while

she worked housekeeping at the hospital. This a

single piece broken off her day, not the whole day.

It is an American haiku, brief, clear, imagistic, and

vibrant with meaning.

At the stanza break, it makes the leap that haiku

must make, from thing to greater meaning. The in-

formation is presented in "proper" order, for the

"cleaned stove" is what opens out to reveal what has

been going on. "Return" and "cleaned stove," if not

an exquisite kind of rhyme, have terrific resonance

or echo - the RE and CLEA sounds at beginning

and end. Lorine doesn't tell us about her whole job,

nor her whole day on the job, nor even the details of

cleaning the kitchen. And yet she tells us so much

with this small fragment.

"Lake Superior"

How does one write a long poem? By setting

fragments of several short poems together around a

single encompassing image, or theme, or idea.

"Lake Superior" is the story of Lake Superior, of

its geology and history, and the story of Al and

Lorine's trip by car around the Lake. The individual

parts of the poem are small, each 16 lines or fewer.

Page 10

Some elements of the poem are geological: In every part of every living thing

is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals

of the rock

Some are elements are historical: Radisson:...

Long hair, long gun

Fingernails pulled out by Mohawks

Some are personal: The smooth black stone I picked up at true source park

the leaf beside it once was stone

Why should we hurry Home

What does the poem mean? "In every part - stuff

that once was rock," she says. "Beauty - impurities

in the rock."

Impurities in the rock might explain Lake Supe-

rior, the lake and the poem, and might also speak to

the principles underlying Lorine's poem-making.

"Impurities in the rock" - those fragments of which I

have been speaking. For it is not the smoothness of

things that one makes into art, but the roughness of

things - the roughness which catches us, that which

stands out, leans out of place, that which doesn't

quite fit, which is broken off, which is not like the

rest.

We know that Lorine had a couple hundred pag-

es of notes behind the writing of "Lake Superior."

Yet only thirteen pieces of those notes come into the

poem. "Lake Superior" the poem is fashioned from

these fragments, the way "In every part of every

living thing/is stuff that once was rock."

Here's a thumbnail of the poem:

1. In every part of every living thing...

2. Iron the common element of earth....

3. Radisson...

of the verse” 4. The long canoes...

5. Beauty: impurities in the rock...

6. Priest-robed Marquette grazed/azoic rock,

hornblende granite...

7. Joliet - Entered the Mississippi...

8. Ruby of corundum/lapis lazuli...

9. Wild Pigeon...

10. Schoolcraft left the Soo...

11. Inland then...

12. The smooth black stone...

13. I'm sorry to have missed...

Out of these fragments Lorine makes a greater

whole. And she does it by creating a mosaic - small

pieces are set in place to create the larger picture.

As if Lorine is saying: "This and this and this and

this, see how this is Lake Superior."

In all these poems, Lorine allows the piece or

part to represent the whole. In an Oriental (and

Objectivist) way, she lets the seen thing speak for

itself. She uses sound to help to control and unify

her fragments. What should be obvious is that

Lorine, despite her poor vision, is excellent at see-

ing: seeing the exact detail to select, seeing which

details to set next to each other, seeing what reso-

nates and shines in the moment she presents it.

2019 Blackhawk Island Writer’s Workshop was held on Saturday, September 28. Lisa Fishman was the group moderator.

Page 11

CONTRIBUTORS

An independent scholar and poet, David Eberly is

coeditor, with Suzette Henke, of Virginia Wool and

Trauma: Embodied Texts. David was fortunate to

have met Cid Corman and to have heard Lorine

Niedecker's voice from a tape recorder Cid balanced

on his lap sitting in the back of his Japanese restau-

rant on Boston's Newbury Street.

Mary Lux is a Milwaukee poet, publishing in

print and online and in a number of anthologies. She

often takes inspiration from the upper Midwest’s

"north country," from Wisconsin’s terrain, its histo-

ry, geography and landscape, and from the lives of

her Wisconsin pioneer forbears. She was introduced

to the beauty of Lorine Niedecker’s poetry years

ago through Woodland Pattern Book Center.

Steven Manuel is editor of from a Compos't, a

poet and lives in Asheville, NC.

John Martone's work can be found (among other

places) at his scribd page:

https://www.scribd.com/ john-martone-2968

Max McKenna is a wr iter and editor living in

Chicago. Since 2012, he has served as a teaching

assistant for the massive open online course Modern

& Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”),

which is offered by the University of Pennsylvania

through Coursera. For more information on the

course, visit www.coursera.org/learn/modpo.

Tom Montag's books of poetry include: M aking

Hay & Other Poems; Middle Ground; The Big Book

of Ben Zen; In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-

2013; This Wrecked World; The Miles No One

Wants; Love Poems; and Seventy at Seventy. His

poem "Lecturing My Daughter in Her First Fall

Rain". has been permanently incorporated into the

design of the Milwaukee Convention Center. He

blogs at The Middlewesterner. With David Graham

he recently co-edited Local News: Poetry About

Small Towns.

Elizabeth Harmatys Park is a Wisconsin native,

a sociologist, and a peace and prison volunteer. Her

poetry has been published in journals and in the

Wisconsin Poetry Calendar. She is a past recipient

of the Jade Ring First Prize in poetry awarded by

the Wisconsin Writers Association.

Nancy Shea is a member of The Fr iends of Lor i-

ne Niedecker. She is grateful to Jenny Penberthy

for pointing her in all the right directions to research

this article.

Solitary Plover Lorine Niedecker Events, 2020 Please check lorineniedecker.org for updates.

Friends Of Lorine Niedecker – Solitary Plover

Study Group Gathering, Fort Atkinson, WI

Saturday, February 29, 10:30 - 11:30 am. Send

email to contact@lorineniedecker.org for location.

Dwight Foster Public Library, Fort Atkinson, WI

April 1-30 Kathy Kuehn exhibit, Jones Gallery

Artist and printer Kathy Kuehn will exhibit her

indigo dyed panels. Each contains a hand sewn

poem by Lorine Niedecker.

Wednesday, April 1, 6:30 pm - Reception and

Artist talk, Jones Gallery. Kuehn will discuss the

inspiration for her work.

Wednesday, April 29, 6:30 pm - Nat’l Poetry

Month Reading, Kathryn Gahl, 2019 winner –

Council for Wisconsin Writers Lorine Niedecker

Prize.

Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee, WI

Saturday, April 25

1 pm - Niedecker Potluck Lunch - Niedecker-

inspired dishes, sign up for the potluck at

woodlandpattern.org in April.

2 pm - Screening of Cathy Cook’s Niedecker

documentary Immortal Cupboard followed by a

panel discussion between Cathy and publisher

David Wilk.

Hoard Historical Museum, Fort Atkinson, WI

Saturday, May 9

10:30 am – 4:30 pm - Lorine’s Birthday Party

Celebrate Lorine with birthday cake and a scav-

enger hunt in the museum for Lorine Factoids.

2 pm - Presentation of new artifacts for the muse-

um Niedecker Collection including the Peace

Pipe and Lorine’s cedar chest where she kept

correspondence.

Blackhawk Island, Fort Atkinson, WI

Observational Walk Workshop - Tentative fall

2020. Check for updates.

Friends of Lorine Niedecker 209 Merchants Avenue Fort Atkinson, WI 53538

The Solitary Plover Winter 2020 Issue # 31

Published by the Friends of Lorine Niedecker

Editor: Amy Lutzke

Poetry Editor: Tom Montag

The Friends of Lorine Niedecker is a non-profit corpo-

ration. There are no staff, just devoted volunteers. Our

goals include preserving and expanding the legacy of

Lorine Niedecker, as well as, offering educational

materials, access to archives, a semiannual newsletter

and events as time and resources are available. We are

supported through donations and grants.

Donations are always welcome and are fully tax-

deductible.

The Solitary Plover is issued twice yearly, in winter

and in summer. Sign up for the email version on our

website.

Friends of Lorine Niedecker

209 Merchants Avenue

Fort Atkinson, WI 53538

(920) 563-7790

The Friends purchased and mounted this plaque indicating the Niedecker cabin’s place on the National Historic Register in November, 2019.